Mio "Spirit"

The legend of Spirit is shrouded in mystery and intrigue changing through the generations as it’s passed down from grandmother’s false teeth, to grandfather’s false leg and onto the children’s wooden toys.  It’s worth taking with a sandpit full of salt. 

Some say it started with the birth of the world itself. A small germ of an idea that was watered and fed and over time evolved and morphed its way up through the primordial soup and the millennia into what we have today. It was hidden through the age of beasts, the time of ice and the era of dark, out of site from the conquering armies and empire builders; until it was discovered by a small boy, in the bottom of a deep well, in the wilds of New Zealand’s South Island.  

Through this dark time the product was known only as X, its name would only be realized when it was born. As it gestated and grew it began to take on form and actualization, a personality became apparent and it whispered to the Creators, “Spirit”.

 
“Ok” thought the designers, “Spirit it is” and promptly removed its voice box, installing a speaker instead.  

Others say a bunch of guys were kept in a room and fed nothing but crushed crisps and coffee sachets through the bottom of the locked door until their brains imploded causing the resulting mass to be less messy and more contained*. 

At the same time as the flat party food and dehydrated drinks were being consumed, a team of marketers were sitting down at Pedro’s Tapas in Soho chomping on chorizo’s, paella and kicking chilies stuffed with cheese. It was during this session which lasted until 3am that its name came about. This was supposed to be a brainstorming session and so it was. Their brains were well and truly stormed. A host of names had been proposed at the start and these were considered dull. So as the doors were closing behind them and they stumbled up the stairs to the cold, wet, bubblegum strewn streets dealers. 

Someone shouted “SPIRIT” into the night air. Its sound echoed around the 18th century parapets and 1960’s facades and landed in each of their ears. “SPIRIT” they all replied in unison. And so the next morning they arrived to find a single word on a yellow post-it on each of their monitors. SPIRIT it said. Nobody knows how it got there, no one took responsibility and indeed no one knew.

The truth may never be known, but if you see some rather skinny, griseous men with sunken eyes and haunted looks walking through the dark night they may be the ones.

Now, these are two possible versions of how Spirit came into the world, the last is quite different. It involves a bunch of highly intelligent people working night and day for a couple of years to produce a great user interface for Mio’s new generation of navigation devices. Together they sat in an office with coffee and water and studiously developed the name.

* The human brain is remarkable in times of great stress. In other animals stress causes an explosion and provides food for other species. Humans implode and provide a less untidy corpse to show relatives to at the funeral.

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